Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, has recently released a free book, suitably entitled Free. Drew Keller, our “Web Strategies for Storytelling” instructor this summer in the MCDM, pointed us students to several responses to the release, including those by Malcolm Gladwell of The New Yorker, marketing guru Seth Godin (in response to Gladwell’s generally dismissive review), and Dallas Mavericks owner/attention whore Mark Cuban. Forgive me for sounding overly casual or trite in my response to the discussion, but I think at this point a dead horse is being beat to an outright pulp. The overwhelming message of the digital age is that free is what the people want, free is what the people are finding ways to get, and new business models are in high demand to figure out how to cash in on free (as impossible as it sounds). Of course, everyone is trying to figure out what those models are. (…and we of the MCDM know the answers always begin with the word ‘social’…)
Now, I haven’t read Free yet, but I want to share my two cents (oh, and for free!). In general, Gladwell tries to poke holes in Anderson’s assertions, pointing to things like the million (oh wow!) Wall Street Journal online subscribers, or the popularity of iPhone apps. Unfortunately, I think what Gladwell is losing sight of is actually resting somewhere in Anderson’s very ‘long tail’ theories. A million is a lot, but it is only a niche. And, without having to pull numbers out of thin air, I’m sure for every iPhone hipster there are ten old school flip phone kiddies. Both Godin and Anderson would agree, the days of blanketing the nation with the widespread diffusion of content innovations which everyone will gladly pay for are over. But there are innovations, like the iPhone itself, which many people will pay for. Infrastructure (carriers, ISPs, and the like) and physical tools (hardware and devices) are the money makers. After that is where things get fuzzy. Except for Google.
So, this is where Cuban comes in, and I actually like a lot of what he says. The delivery method is the rub, and Cuban wisely points this out. We will gladly pay for access to content, and the tools to do such. But it’s the services that are freely distributing otherwise viable (and free) content which are suffering. YouTube is unprofitable despite its popularity, and Gladwell points this out in his Free review. Services like YouTube need to buy commercial-grade content to get ad dollars from businesses that don’t get the social element of the web. But apparently they lose millions on turning around and giving away that content. Heaven forbid the Wall Street Journal bother reaching the trampoline-accident-video demographic. But, then who ARE they reaching with the glossier content? And how much money does one need to pay for that niche? And YouTube FOSTERS this! Maybe that’s why their ship has sprung a serious leak! And this is where I disagree with Cuban – he thinks you need to find ways to control distribution. That, my friend, is an outdated argument. To paraphrase John Gilmore (again, and I do it a lot), the Net views message control as a defect and routes around it.
Many very large incumbent businesses don’t really ‘get’ the social element of social media. I don’t know all the metrics, but I’m certain that the ten million views that that trampoline video picked up weren’t all from Myspace young’uns. The Internets have their own culture. The beast has an aesthetic and personality all its own. Like many have already pointed out, it’s a folk culture driven by the users, users who approach the medium differently than prior spaces. So, come down and be a user, too, Mr. Mega Corporation. Play with us. Be responsive and make friends with all kinds. Loosen that tie and get dirty. The web is where you get to be a little crazy, and the cost to experiment is minimal. Don’t fight free, embrace it.
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Tags: chris anderson, drew keller, free content, malcolm gladwell, mark cuban, monetization, seth godin, youtube